Reconnecting the experience of transitioning from university to work in the Anthropocene era.

Living in the Anthropocene—a crisis epoch marked by the pervasive impact of human activity on ecosystems, climate, and Earth’s geology—generates profound disorientation. Modern scientific epistemology, which frames humanity as separate from its environment, appears increasingly untenable. Gregory Bateson (1972) identified this separation as a fundamental epistemological error. The environmental crisis is simultaneously natural, social, and political, yet the human–nature dualism persists, deeply embedded in educational practices. Education often remains depository (Hooks, 1994), privileging abstract, frontal knowledge transmission, while research—including adult education—frequently neglects embodied, experiential, and participatory forms of knowing (Formenti, West, Hordal, 2014). This profound incongruence between the functioning of living systems and education is a source of disorientation. As researchers, we interrogated our own experiences of disorientation and alienation to develop a co-operative research model (Heron, 1996) within a broader national project exploring transitions between university and the world of work for graduates in educational sciences. Moving forward with a constructivist and systemic approach, we conducted participatory research involving three cycles of co-operative inquiry across two master’s degree programmers. The findings show how the researchers’ embodied positioning, together with participatory and arts-based research practices (Grummell & Finnegan, 2020), enabled a critical interrogation of the employability model and the adoption of a dynamic, embodied, situated, and relational understanding that integrates professional and personal dimensions. This approach reconfigures life trajectories by connecting university education with work experiences within the broader context of participants’ lives. Finally, the research process itself was recognized as a transformative experience for both participants and researchers, fostering collective reflection on modes of encounter and exchange within university settings. References Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Ballantine. Bell Hooks (1994). Teaching to transgress. Education as a practice of freedom. Princeton University Press. Formenti, L., West, L., Horsdal, M. (Eds) (2014). Embodied narratives. Connecting stories, bodies, culture and ecologies. University of Southern Denmark Press. Grummell, B., & Finnegan, F. (Eds.). (2020). Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education: Case Studies in Methodology and Theory. Brill. Heron, J. (1996). Co-operative inquiry. Research into human condition. Sage Pubblication.